Crime pays

Graham Greene: 'I'd be a good priest because stories come in one ear and go out the other.' Photograph: Sean Smith

Graham Greene is usually thought of as a man of letters, one of the 20th century's greatest novelists, whose work dealt with weighty themes. But Greene spent the first two decades of his working life writing crime and espionage thrillers, novels that were inextricably bound up with the cinema of his time. He was, at various times in his life, a movie-lover, critic and scriptwriter; film is at the heart of his work and his fiction is remarkable for its powerful cinematic qualities, written at a time when the movies were still considered a relatively new and popular art form. "When I describe a scene, I capture it with the moving eye of a camera," he once said.

Film had a profound influence on his writing, but his work also had a lasting impact on cinema. It is no exaggeration to say that he was one of the founders of film noir - as testified by the enduring appeal of The Third Man. It's not the unsettling music (played by Anton Karas), the inspired performances (directed by Carol Reed) or even the "cuckoo clock" speech (written by Orson Welles) that make The Third Man the archetypal European noir film, but Greene's dry dialogue and shadowy setting in the streets and sewers of Vienna.

From the mid-1930s until the early 1940s, Greene was film critic for the Spectator. Aside from producing some of the most trenchant reviews of his or indeed any other time (collected in the Graham Greene Film Reader, edited by David Parkinson), Greene learned a great deal about film-makers, which would influence his decisions about those with whom he was later prepared to work. He developed a hatred for all of Hitchcock's films, which led him to block the director from acquiring the rights to his novel Our Man in Havana, but his admiration for director Carol Reed led to his most successful cinematic partnership: the pair made three films together over 10 years.

As a critic, Greene expressed his enthusiasm not only for American Charlie Chan and Perry Mason detective movies, but also for British crime pictures such as They Drive By Night and The Arsenal Stadium Mystery. "A thriller is comparatively easy: a gun is photogenic: the camera can move at the speed of a G-man's car. But in a detective story it has to amble at the walking pace of a mind," Greene wrote in the Spectator in 1940, sketching out some of the technical challenges he was already exploring in his own fiction.

After the quiet reception of his first three romantic adventure novels, Greene turned to detective stories and thrillers in the hope of producing a bestseller. The result was Stamboul Train (1932), which drew on his experiences outside his own upper-middle-class background, his growing fascination with exotic travel and his enjoyment of convoluted espionage stories. Stamboul Train was popular and, with its seedy atmospheric setting, established the distinctive fictional world that would come to be recognised as "Greeneland". From this point on, the author was at pains to distinguish between his so-called "entertainments" and his more serious work, referring to his next thriller, the wonderful A Gun for Sale (1936), the story of a hired assassin, as a "shocker".

The Hollywood studios were quick to see the potential of A Gun for Sale. Pulp fiction and crime stories were phenomenally popular in the US at the time. And writers such as Raymond Chandler, James M Cain, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich were appearing in pulp magazines and cheap paperback imprints, with the movie industry snapping up their stories and signing them up as scriptwriters. But Greene was completely outside this scene: his books were printed by respectable hardcover publishers and there is little evidence that he knew or cared much about his US pulp cousins.

Yet he did begin to sell rights to the movie studios. A Gun for Sale was adapted into This Gun for Hire in 1942, with a script co-written by the great American crime writer WR Burnett (author of Little Caesar, High Sierra and The Asphalt Jungle). Although Greene disliked it, the film was a box-office hit - launching Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake's on-screen double act - and highly influential. With its terse dialogue, moody romanticism and firecracker action, This Gun for Hire is one of the earliest examples of the existential American thrillers that rapturous French critics were to classify as film noir. Even though the film-makers changed the country, period and manners of the original novel, the movie, with its down-at-heel romanticism and cynicism, is still clearly based on Greene's work.

This overlap between Greeneland and noir can be found again in Fritz Lang's Ministry of Fear (1943), another wartime adaptation of one of Greene's entertainments. Neither the director nor the author (an admirer of Lang) thought much of it, but it has an authenticity of mood that distinguishes it as both noir and Greene.

After this, Greene and the American crime movie diverged, mainly because he stopped writing "shockers" and embarked on his own crime screenplays set in Europe. But the contradictory relationship between Greene's fictional landscape and the essentially American noir tradition remains throughout his work.

When Greene began Brighton Rock in the late 1930s, he intended it to be a return to his entertainments, partially modelled on American mob tales. It was only deep into the story of tortured Catholic gangster Pinkie that he invested the time and energy into creating the first really major novel of his career.

But despite the widespread acclaim with which the book was greeted, it was not until the late 1940s that the film finally got off the ground. British director-producer team John and Roy Boulting invited Greene, by now an experienced scriptwriter, to adapt the novel himself. The Boulting brothers' fidelity to his script, the memorable casting (in particular Richard Attenborough as Pinkie) and the gritty real-life Brighton locations made the 1947 film of Brighton Rock the first and (aside perhaps from Jules Dassin's 1950 Night and the City) the only great British noir movie.

Despite censorship problems and a mixed response when the film was released, its reputation has grown over the years. If Hollywood had reduced Greene's work to crime thrillers, here he beat them at their own game by transporting the violence, pace and psychological realism of noir into an English setting. The film was retitled Young Scarface in the US, linking it to the famous Hawks movie Scarface (1932), because the studios wanted to market it as a gangster thriller.

The achievement of Brighton Rock led the way for Greene's last and most profound contribution to the genre, The Third Man. Although Greene apparently pitched the idea for The Third Man to the Boulting brothers, nothing materialised until Hungarian film producer Alexander Korda acted as a matchmaker between Greene and director Carol Reed. Together they produced The Fallen Idol in 1948, and its positive reception inspired Greene to start writing a screenplay - his first that was not based on an earlier work.

The film began with just an idea (a man goes to the funeral of a friend only to see the deceased standing at the graveside) and a location, Vienna. As Observer film critic and Greene aficionado Philip French has pointed out, the plot of The Third Man bears a more than glancing resemblance to A Coffin for Dimitrios, a classic 1930s Eric Ambler novel, adapted into an average Hollywood film ( The Mask of Dimitrios , from 1944). But The Third Man is much more than a derivative, secondhand work. Greene and Reed were marvellous collaborators, and together created a unique kind of thriller in a recently war-ravaged, exotic European city. In this atmospheric, Greenelandish setting, the plot, with its focus on trying to catch Harry Lime - who is dealing in lethal fake antibiotics - takes on a grander international dimension in the aftermath of the second world war. In this bleak portrait of postwar Europe, the villain, significantly, is an American.

Greene draws upon American pulp fiction with satirical relish to reinforce this message. The action unfolds from the bumbling perspective of struggling pulp writer Holly Martins. He is the last to discover the truth about his friend Harry's corruption. Lime, played by Orson Welles, is an ideal noir villain: shrouded in mystery, he hides in the shadows but, when finally revealed, proves to be a wise-cracking criminal mastermind.

With The Lady From Shanghai, which he had directed and starred in the previous year, Welles had become a major exponent of noir. In bringing together a disintegrating European culture with the brash arrival of American power, The Third Man cynically reflects the new world order.

Greene gradually lost his love for the silver screen and his enthusiasm for producing entertainments (except for the final comic spy excursion, Our Man in Havana). He would never repeat the cinematic triumph of The Third Man - and perhaps he and the movies were the lesser for it.

· Adrian Wootton is chief executive of Film London and director of the National Film Theatre's Crime Scene festival. Graham Greene's crime movies screen at the NFT, London SE1, from Thursday. Box office: 020-7928 3232.